Oh dear. Maybe this is why the run away when I come to kill them? They've heard me talking about it...

Apparently people put basil in flower arrangements to make them smell good, or so says the flower farmers that have a YouTube presence that I watch.

I'm a federal employee, so I got 12 paid weeks without use of my vacation time. I'm sure the federal system follows whatever the local laws are, but I wasn't going to push anything anyways (why leave a tenure track job I'm happy at?).

My intuition required that I come back and work for the number of weeks I took on maternity leave. If I didn't, then I'd have to pay back whatever pay I got on maternity leave. (i.e. 12 paid weeks off required I come back for 12 weeks after the end of my leave to not owe anything.)

I'd like to say we are still pretty rad! I very much enjoy working here.

Maybe we should measure air quality in terms of reddening...

Yes, but is this a magnitude system?

Now that is the way to start the semester! *Chef's kiss*

The year before I started at my current institution the internet went down for several weeks at the start of the fall semester and they made sure to tell me not to rely on it for teaching during my orientation.

Yep. I'm playing the same trick as you to email my class. Maybe there was an agreement that all universities give up class listservs and they forgot to tell us. But they left the regular faculty listservs going so we could get the all important emails about junk still.

My listserv also isn't working. Maybe there's a poltergeist in the internet?

This is my kind of Monday energy.

Ah, yes! His office is a couple doors down from mine. I do polarimetry of stellar stuff, but I imagine it could be very useful for his work, too.